Chris Bell

Director of Global Recruiting and Employer Brand, N26

As a seasoned leader in the talent acquisition space, I believe that inclusive and engaging leadership is the way to help your team succeed. With 17 years of experience in recruiting and employer brand, I am able to take my experiences and adapt them to challenging situations. Ambiguity and change will always play a factor in fast paced growth and having a mindset that can deal with this is what has helped me succeed over the years. With N26 the challenge was and still is great, it changes weekly and how I approach it is to develop consistencies in my approach while making sure the team is on the journey with me.

I started my career in more corporate environments where I quickly became the lead of a team, right out of leaving university. This experience led me to a long and constructive career in freelancing, where the majority of my assignments were to build and create businesses from scratch, hiring the people to get a project or business in a good place to deliver against their long term goals. Having achieved hiring of 2000 people in 2 years for a transport start up in the UK, I went on to set up my own RPO business focussing on helping businesses to improve their recruiting strategy.

It became too much of a sales job for me and I wasn't feeling passionate about my work, so I decided to go back to the freelance world. I did that for 2 years before joining N26 in 2018. Having been at N26 for 2.5 years and seen the employee numbers by 500% in the time I have been here, it's still exciting for me to see that every week is different and the challenge just gets bigger and bigger.